Chopin: Piano Sonata / Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit / Prokofiev: Piano Sonata

After the scandal following his elimination at the Chopin competition in Warsaw in 1980, the Chopin from 1981 and the Ravel and Prokofiev from 1982 are among Ivo Pogorelich's earliest and most controversial recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. As a performer, Pogorelich is intensely introspective and probing. Some may feel his rubato a tad excessive and tempo's precariously slow, though few have extracted as much inner detail from Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit or delivered a more powerfully shaped rendering of Chopin's 2nd Sonata (the concluding 4th movement is particularly astonishing!). DG's original-image bit-processed remastered sound also is remarkably good- certainly much better than when these we're first issued as two full-priced CD's.